A proposed partnership amoung Google and Yahoo for the sale and distribution of online advertisements has been a hot topic in tech circles that year, drawing scrutiny from privacy groups, European regulators and the Justice division. Now reports are circulating that the long-delayed deal might fall apart.

In an scoop in the online version of the Wall Street Journal, reporter Jessica Vascellaro says that according to “people familiar with the matter,” the companies might walk away from the deal as early as next week.

“The two companies met Thursday with the Justice station, part of a series of meetings to address the concerns of regulators,” Vascellaro reported. “While the parties may agree to continue the talks — or they could reach a resolution — there are signs they are unwilling to construct compromises to address the Justice Department’s objections.”

Representatives of both companies said that discussions with the Justice agency are ongoing, but otherwise declined to discuss the specifics of any negotiations. Yahoo spokesperson Tracy Schmaler said that Yahoo is still hoping to resolve matters.

“We have been working with the division of Justice regarding our agreement with Google, and those discussions are ongoing,” Schmaler said. “As we have said, we believe strongly that that agreement will strengthen Yahoo’s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher-quality Yahoo marketplace for our advertisers, publishers and users.”

Sticking Points

Without more elaboration from the principals, it is difficult to know precisely what is holding up the Justice Department’s verdict on the antitrust implications of the proposed ad deal. The companies agreed to give the Justice station four months to evaluate the proposal, but the deadline came and went earlier that month without any word from Washington.

Vascellaro suggested that one sticking point is a DOJ proposal to have the parties sign a consent…

Original post by dhiram

Google has rarely included scanned documents in its search results considering it had no way to determine the nature of the subject matter, but that’s about to change. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to manufacture it possible for Web surfers to search any Web-hosted document stored in the PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.

Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.

“This is a small but vital step forward in our mission of making all the world’s data accessible and useful,” Levey said.

A Boon for Books

The company’s brute-force application of OCR technology to the Web is additionally expected to aid Google Book Search — the ambitious and controversial book-scanning project that the search engine giant first unveiled at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair. Ever since, Google has been scanning the book collections at the world’s major libraries at a rate of 3,000 book titles per day.

Though the project initially raised copyright concerns, Google has just concluded an agreement with the Authors Guild and the organization of American Publishers under which Google will be able to expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the United States. The agreement resolves lawsuits that had challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond says the agreement is truly groundbreaking considering it will give readers online access to millions of in-copyright books for the very first moment.

“Second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell…

Original post by dhiram

IBM is not letting go without a fight. The computer maker has filed a lawsuit against one of its former top-level executives who left the company to work at Apple.

Mark Papermaster, a server expert and vice president of IBM’s blade development unit, is slated to start at Apple in just a few weeks but his knowledge of IBM trade secrets may stop him from joining the maker of Macs.

IBM, which spends billions on research each year, is basing its lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan on Oct. 22 on a non-competition agreement Papermaster signed in 2006 which states he would not work for any competitor up to one year after his employment ended with IBM. The complaint additionally cites IBM trade secrets as another reason for stopping the move to work alongside with Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs.

The no-compete document, in which Papermaster signed, says the executive acknowledges that IBM engages in an intensely competitive environment and will not associate with or engage in any business enterprise for one year work for any competitor and for two years not lure any other IBM employee to a competitor.

“Mr. Papermaster’s employment by Apple is a violation of his agreement with IBM against working for a competitor should he leave IBM,” said IBM in a statement to CNET, who broke the story. “We will vigorously pursue that case in court.”

The 26-year veteran is plus a member of the company’s Integration and Values Team, a group of more than 300 senior managers. The IVT group is responsible for IBM’s most significant and challenging issues, according to court documents. whether those issues are shared with competitors, IBM will lose its upper hand.

Head-to-Head

IBM’s work in microprocessors and servers perhaps the crux behind the lawsuit. IBM states in court documents that Papermaster’s years working…

Original post by dhiram

In a wake of Gmail outages and buggy Apps that drew the ire of its loyal user base, Google on Thursday announced a service level agreement (SLA) for the Premier Edition of Google Apps.

Google’s premium online productivity and collaboration suite now comes with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites and Google Talk.

Through its internal research, Google determined Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the instance for the past year, despite the negative headlines in August 2008. Even whether you factor in the August outage, Google said there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of Gmail downtime per month by the last year. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds at a day.

“A very small number of society have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry,” Matthew Glotzbach, a product management director at Google Enterprise, wrote in the company blog. “And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.”

Google Toots its Reliability Horn

According to Radicati Group, companies with on-premises e-mail solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.

From that research and Google’s own analytics, Glotzbatch concluded that Gmail is twice as dependable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more dependable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves.

Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as dependable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more dependable than an Exchange-based solution whether you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms, Glotzbatch noted.

“Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange,…

Original post by dhiram

Wednesday’s announcement that Tivo will start offering streaming video from DVD-rental company Netflix is one more indication that technology companies increasingly see an on-demand future.

Under the terms of the agreement, the owners of recent Tivo machines (TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL) who plus have an unlimited Netflix subscription will be able to choose and watch subject matter from Netflix’s library of approximately 12,000 on-demand titles.

“This is a collaboration amoung two like-minded Silicon Valley companies,” said Steve Swasey, Vice-President of Corporate Communcations for Netflix. “They are both fast-moving and creative.”

Brief Flirtation in 2004

The two companies held brief talks about the possibility of streaming videos to Tivo boxes back in 2004, but Swasey said the current agreement is unrelated to those conversations.

“That was a separate view altogether,” Swasey said. “Both companies were overly ambitious and overly eager back thereupon, and we thought we could be further along than we were. So we haven’t been in negotiations with Tivo on that since 2004.”

Swasey said that Netflix did not start roll out its streaming functionality until 2007. Once it did so, however, the company has been aggressively pursuing partnerships to augment its service.

“At the beginning of 2007, Netflix had a DVD distribution business model,” Swasey said. “A short instance later, we offered to streaming to PCs with a library of about 2,000 titles. Fast forward to 2008, we’ve got streaming to Macs, to video players, to the Xbox, and now to Tivo. And in many cases, our customers are paying less. The goal is to give consumers the ability to watch our subject matter on whatever screen they choose.

Swasey would not predict whether Tivo or Netflix would ultimately pick up more subscribers from the deal, but said that the partnership should benefit both. “With that agreement,” Swasey argued, “Tivo joins 4 other great…

Original post by dhiram

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference set the scene for a slew of major announcements and releases from the software giant, but one piece of news–although significant–did not get the attention it deserved.

Microsofoft’s announced its Live Framework platform which is a uniform way for programming Live Services from a host of platforms, programming languages, devices and applications, according to the company.

Live Framework is the spine behind making it easier to share goods and application amidst users, enabling Web-based solutions to be available on a user’s PC and phone both offline and online, and the use of interoperable protocols to synchronize goods and applications across a user’s devices.

Live Framework, unveiled during a keynote speech, is the underlying layer of Live Mesh which enables file sync and sharing across devices. Live Mesh, which was announced in the spring and is now available in beta, allows citizens, their info and their devices to mesh together.

Split in Three

Microsoft designers split the Live Framework into three separate components. The first component is the Live operating environment, which is a service engine which exposes endpoints, according to Microsoft. Client endpoints include background synchronization of documents and application with the cloud or simple peer to peer with other clients.

A second component includes the resource model. Designers said all resources follow a consistent discovery and allows for creating custom domain specific types that can be synchronized and shared and accessible across devices and the cloud.

The last component is the programming and application model which includes resource models for deploying, managing, and running apps.

Still in the Making

As with Azure, Live Framework is still in its infancy and Microsoft is encouraging developers to jump in the sandbox and play.

David Treadwell, Microsoft’s vice president of Live Services, in a Live Blog said Live Framework will build it easier for…

Original post by dhiram

Sony and three major PC makers are recalling 100,000 laptop batteries in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Lithium-Ion batteries used in about 35,000 Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell notebook computers — as well as an additional 65,000 units sold worldwide — are defective. Specifically, these Lithium-Ion batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers.

As of Oct. 30, there have been 19 reports of the batteries overheating, including 17 reports of flames and fire. Ten of those battery failures resulted in minor property damage, and two consumers experienced minor burns.

“This is not a huge recall seeing as there were millions before from Sony’s last round,” said Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. “But we’ve already seen way more instances of flames and property damage than there was in the last big battery recall.”

Checking Your Battery

Computers with the recalled batteries were sold directly the PC makers, through computer and electronics stores nationwide, and through various Web retailers for amoung $700 and $3,000. The batteries were plus sold separately for amidst $100 and $160.

HP is recalling batteries that have a barcode label beginning with A0, L0, L1 or GC that were shipped with HP Pavilion dv1000, dv8000 and zd8000 models, Compaq Presario v2000 and v2400 machines and with HP Compaq nc6110, nc6120, nc6140, nc6220, nc6230,nx4800, nx4820, nx6110, nx6120 and nx9600 computers.

Dell is recalling battery model OU091 in its Latitude 110L and Inspirion 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150 and 5160 computers. Toshiba’s recall includes about 3,000 Satellite A70/A75, P30/P5, M30X/M35X and M50/M55 laptops and Tecra A3, A5 and S2 computers.

“Consumers should immediately remove the recalled battery from their notebook computer, and contact their computer manufacturer to determine whether their battery is included in the recall and to inquiry a free replacement battery,” the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission…

Original post by dhiram